The Double Standard

There is an excellent interview with Lawrence Stager in the current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. Among other things, Dr. Stager discusses the problem of a younger generation of archaeologists who “either ignore Biblical material completely or don’t really have the facility or ability to deal with it.” He also says, “There are some archaeologists who don’t want to deal with the Bible at all, even though it contains the most important group of texts we have.”

This makes sense from a secular perspective. After all, secularists believe the Bible is only a collection of Ancient Near Eastern texts, which, as history, are hardly reliable. They probably don’t trust any ancient texts to give an accurate account of history, right?

Not so. According to Stager, “Scholars are much more gullible about nonbiblical texts than they are about Biblical texts. They are much more suspicious of Bibilical texts. Quite often, if it’s said in an Assyrian annal, it’s taken literally.”

Comments

Popular Posts

If you haven't seen Tweet Mashup yet, go check it out. It's hilarious. Just put two twitter accounts into the machine, and, voila, you get an instant idea of what would happen if two people were merged into one. I was playing around yesterday wondering what would happen if Joel Osteen and Donald Trump were the same person. Here are a couple of the results.

When we think of Martin Luther, we often picture a fat man with a grumpy,
pugnacious disposition. The second part of that picture probably comes from
being familiar with Luther's polemic writings without putting them in the
context of similar writings by other authors of that time period, and also from
not being familiar with Luther's more pastoral writings and sermons. The first
part of the picture, that Luther was a very fat man, comes from the fact that
most of the portraits we have of him come from when he was an older man and had
become portly through the good cooking and good beer of his wife, Katie.

But a witness of Luther's disputation with Eck at Leipzig
paints a very different picture of Luther. Luther was 35 years old at the time,
and this is how he is described:
"Martin is of middle height, emaciated from care and study, so that you
can almost count his bones through his skin. he is in the vigor of manhood and
has a clear, penetrating voice. He is learne…

This passage has stuck in my mind ever since I read The Silver Chair this summer.

For context, Puddleglum the Marshwiggle, along with 2 children and a prince, is trapped in an underground world by an evil witch. The witch uses her powers to try to persuade her captives to forget the world above, telling them that their idea of a sun simply stems from seeing lamps and wishing for a bigger better lamp, and their idea of a lion stems from seeing cats and wishing for a bigger and better cat. After a few moments, Puddleglum answers:

"'One word, Ma'am,' he said... 'One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Supose we have. Then all I can …